Community Outreach

INFO:

The community outreach department strives to engage and inspire members of the local and global community to pursue STEM careers and to experience FIRST. Students interact personally with children, teachers, and professionals at over 50 outreach events each year, sharing the message that FIRST is about much more than building robots.

To reach our local community, we participate in events such as the East Cobber Parade, an annual parade and carnival event where we showcase our robots. Children have the chance to drive our robots, receive paper Walts, and play STEM video games. We also demonstrate and present at local elementary and middle schools where we teach children about STEM and FIRST. We also offer three robotics camps where team members act as camp mentors and teach the campers not only how to build and program robots but also how to work together as a team and collaborate. We also work alongside the Pete Nance Boys and Girls Club and Georgia Tech University to run camps.

Our relationships with sponsors are key to what we do. We volunteer at their events, such as GE Engineer’s Week, and help them meet their goals in whatever way we can. Last summer, we went to Brazil to host a one-week camp for underprivileged children with the help of our sponsor, Novelis. Novelis has especially supported our efforts to empower girls in STEM fields by helping us create and disperse our new product: Walt’s STEM Toolbox. The Toolbox contains both versions of our Outreach in Box kits, Camp in a Can, and our storybook. Our community outreach department all in all does an excellent job of inspiring the next generation of technological leaders to pursue STEM careers in their future.

Upcoming 2016 Events:

East Cobb Rotary Dog Days Run

Pete Nance Boys and Girls Club Summer Camp

STEM Compass Camp at Georgia Tech

WIT Connect Event

Cobb EMC Lego Builds

Murdock Elementary School Science Fair

AGA Day of Code Demo

East Side Elementary Demo

East Cobber Parade and Festival

Walton Robotics Camp: Java, NXT, VEX

GirlsFIRST Workshop

GirlsFIRST Interview Workshop with Tag Ed

GirlsFIRST Jr

Atlanta Science Festival

GA STEM Day

Soccer Bot Collaboration with Atlanta Falcons

GA Tech RoboJackets Symposium and Workshop

Mentoring Robotics Queens

Outreach in a Box 3

Pep Rallies and Football Games

Volunteer services at Walton High School

Science Olympiad events

GA STEM Forum

GSTA: Georgia Science Teacher’s Association

Sponsor Family Days

Novelis Women’s Outreach in a Box Project

Novelis Zonta International Women’s Day

GE Engineers Week

ACCOMPLISHMENTS:

GirlsFIRST

A few years ago, the girls on the Walton Robotics Team were determined to create a supportive community of girls in FIRST as they saw challenges as well as hope for female involvement in STEM. The result of their hard work was a program called GirlsFIRST, which is a sustained series of events designed to empower female students to pursue careers in STEM and to change the way culture views girls as “more suited” to feminine tasks. Walton Robotics continues to expand this program every year, reaching more girls and building a network with female leaders in STEM industries. The initiative hosts events featuring speakers, panels, small group mentoring, robot scrimmages, engineering activities, and outreach development serving as invaluable opportunities to become involved in a community of girls in STEM and FIRST. The program is for all high school girls, even those who are not on a FIRST team.

An icebreaker activity for participants

Team members and visitors at our GirlsFIRST Event

Outreach-in-a-Box

Outreach-in-a-Box is a kit designed by Walton Robotics to facilitate efforts in inspiring more girls to pursue STEM fields. Our team has developed two versions of Outreach in a Box for our new STEM kit, Walt’s STEM Toolbox. We continue to distribute these kits free of charge to schools, teams, and groups to support STEM education. Outreach in a Box: Earhart is an outreach kit designed to target female students with enough materials to build 50 slingshot rocket projects. The kit also contains handouts about the concepts of aerodynamics and the engineering design process. Outreach in a Box: Curie focuses on chromatography. The kit contains supportive materials, including PET Preforms, markers, and M&Ms, for 50 people to do the activity. In addition to the educational support materials, we have also included information about materials engineering. Our kits are specifically used to support GA STEM Day in Cobb elementary schools.

Outreach in a Box Earhart Display

Walton Robotics girls at the Novelis OiaB kit build

Teams We Support

Team 2974 heavily supports a few local FIRST teams. They include FTC team 4631, The Afterburners; FTC team 4327, East Cobb Robotics; FLL team 18529, The Robotics Queens; and FRC team, 4910 East Cobb Robotics. We support a lot more teams in Georgia through our Destination Einstein program (click on the Destination Einstein tab for information). We provide support in many different ways for the teams listed above. If a team is having trouble with their robot, or need a place to practice, our facility, tools, and aid are at their disposal.

Walton Robotics and East Cobb Robotics with the Robotics Queens

HISTORY:

Community Outreach Events:

We have run, hosted, or participated in more than 17 camps and over 200 outreach events in the last five years which include:

Walton Robotics NXT/EV3, Java Programming, and VEX camps

STEM Compass Camp at Georgia Tech

Boys and Girls Pete Nance Camp

JT Anderson Boys and Girls Club

GirlsFIRST Event

Girls from all over the region, including Tennessee, participated in the GirlsFIRST workshop.

Keynote speaker: Heather Rocker, president of GAFIRST

Panelists:

Valeria Mackey, Coca Cola Company

Allison Giddens, Win-Tech

Jessica Osborn, Randstad

GirlsFIRST Jr.

Queens:

We mentor the Queens, an FLL team started by the local Boys and Girls Club.

The Queens eventually won the state championships!

We have hosted/participated in over 200 outreach events (50+ events annually for the last four years)